this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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What are everyone's thoughts on bots like piped bot and tdlr bot

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I don't click piped links myself, but some people find them useful.

As for tldr bot, it's useful insofar it gets an idea across for wether I want to read the article, but leaves out a lot of information, often vital to the story, and leaves in fluff.

They aren't perfect, but useful for some.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Same. Personally, for whatever reason, piped links almost never work for me. I'm sure they work for others or the bot posts wouldn't get upvotes. Revanced or Firefox with a blocker almost always work for me though.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 4 months ago (2 children)

PipedBot: no issues with it.

TldrBot: I get frustrated with the number of times I see a story where only the bot has commented. "There's someone here... No there's not".

It's not the bots fault really, but I wonder if it should wait until somebody else has commented so zero comment stories stay at zero.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 4 months ago

I think most clients should implement some kind of logic to remove bot comments form the comment counts. AFAIK, lemmy already has a feature to distinguish bots(?), so it should probably should be possible to at least suggest some easy enough api for that if none exist currently.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

Comment count should really just show "0 (1) comments"

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think they live on a beautiful botfarm somewhere. They come here every day and give us the same alternative links to youtube videos and alike over and over again. Their life is simple. They don't engage much. They find purpose in the small tasks we give them. And I think they are happy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

This was beautiful to read. Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Piped bot is annoying. I never bother using it's links. I have ReVanced for that. I don't know if the links it makes are actually useful to anyone.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What I would love is a bot that takes yt links and posts the corresponding title and description of the video.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

This would better be done in the front-end rather than a comment bot.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Pipedbot: hate it. Piped has never once worked for me and the bot's formatted comments are massive. If you prefer an alternative YouTube frontend, it should be on you to open it using the canonical link you're given IMO. I blocked this bot months ago.

TLDR bot: I didn't like it back when it didn't use spoiler tags since its comments were enormous. Now I don't mind as long as it makes them collapsible by default.

Other bots: it depends on what they do and how obtrusively they do it

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago

The Piped bot pisses me off because it doesn't seem to check if the triggering comment already includes the exact link it's about to post. I used to preemptively include Piped links with any YouTube ones but since it would trigger the bot anyway I just stopped bothering.

Aside from the clutter it adds, until I added the bot itself to my blocklist (instead of just relying on "Show bots" being unchecked in settings) it would also cause reply notifications that couldn't be cleared in the default Lemmy web UI.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

Conceptually useful bots (even if they aren't always great) like those two I approve of. You can easily ignore them, but they're there for when you want them.

The meme bots that were on reddit like grond we could do without. They were fun at the time, but I'm glad we don't have them here.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I find them a bit annoying, particularly TLDR bot, as it sometimes butchers articles by leaving out key information, so much so that it nearly borders on misinformation (eg, in an article about a SE Asian country voting on gay marriage, it cut out all portions about the vote, suggesting that it was legalized when it hadn't been voted on yet or passed.)

Unfortunately, it gets highly upvoted, so many people skip the article and think that this country now has legalized gay marriage when it actually has not.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Also will never present things like date of publication or author. Both of which can change the context of the whole thing.

[–] southsamurai 13 points 4 months ago

I bloody love them both. Yeah, tldr isn't perfect, but it's usually "good enough". And the piped bot makes life so much easier for anyone wanting to share something cool without having to jump through that extra hoop.

True QOL bots, both of them

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

Pipedbot is great, I didn't know about piped until I came to Lemmy and now I use it pretty frequently

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

It's a mixed bag. Piped bot is just generally "meh" for me. With all the ad blocking I have turned on, I don't really see ads on Youtube and would rather give what little support my views provide to the creators on the platform. I also subscribe to Nebula to try and support them directly.

Many of the bots, especially the really noisy re-post type bots I tend to block. Sure, I want to see content on Lemmy, but a bot reposting everything from a site has a problem with just creating a lot of noise without any sort of filtering for interesting content. But, since I can block them selectively, I'd rather people had the room to create and I'll just remove the ones I don't like from my feed. Everyone wins.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

The piped bot links don't work me and I don't need them anyway.

On android, I changed the default permissions from the regular YouTube app to "ask every time". Other installed apps that support YouTube links will then show up in the prompt when opening YouTube links.

[–] Habahnow 10 points 4 months ago

Like them both. But theyre both flawed.

Piped doesn't seems to always work for me. Tldr bot doesñsn't always provide vital information

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

I like both of them. I'm pro bot. I miss the spaghetti hentai bot.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Both of em pretty good

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I appreciate them, but never use them. I already auto-redirect youtube links to an alt frontend, and already don't read articles.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

I use a redirector extension for YouTube so PipedBot is useless and annoying for me. I'd rather someone just give me a YouTube URL and let the redirector extension do its work.

TL;DRbot is okay, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Unpaywall bot would be more useful than tldr. Probably.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Certainly better than any reddit bots.

If I wanted to read reddit, I'd go to reddit.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Take up too much space in comments and often not very useful.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

My only issue is the reply shouldn't be as long as it is. .

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It shouldn't be this big

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

I blocked the piped bot. Don't care about the rest.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

TLDR bot often takes items out of context and come off just plain wrong. Or it’s a long article skips important things entirely. To get the correct story just read the original.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

What are everyone’s thoughts on bots like piped bot and tdlr bot

I don't mind them. If I did I'd block them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Great to have the tl;dr bot here.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I never see them, I think we got to opt out of them when we signed up?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There's a lemmy profile setting whether to show bots, you probably have that turned off.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I'm on kbin and can't find it. What are the bots like these days? Is it just these two bots or are there repost bots trying to copy reddit content?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I have bots on and it's mostly ever these two.

There are still reddit repost bots, but they are all on reddit repost instances. As I have those like two or three instances blocked, I don't see any of them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I like the TLDR bot but I wouldn’t rely on it for anything important. I’ll read the summary and if it’s just some fluff piece, I’m not too worried about it if it skipped a detail. But for serious journalism, I read the article. There’s a huge difference between an article about a video game or celebrity and an article about a war or natural disaster.

Piped bot doesn’t seem to work for me anyway but I don’t usually click video links. I prefer text to video for actual info so I mostly just click the videos on a comment when it’s an obvious joke and they’re referencing something funny.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I ended up blocking PipedBot. The links seldom work and I got tired of seeing posts look like they have comments to start discussion but it's just PipedBot.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I don't like the Piped bot at all.

What should be posted on the internet should be the canonical source of some content, not a proxy for it. If users prefer a proxy, they should configure their clients to redirect to the proxy. Piped instances come and go and the entire project is at the mercy of Google tolerating it/not taking action against it, so it could be gone tomorrow.

I use piped myself. I have client-side configurations which simply redirects all Youtube links to my piped instance. No need for any bots here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I never bother clicking the piped bot links, and I'm not a fan of the tldr bot either as I think there's activity on a post but it turns out it's just the bot.